Age effect

still around? how long?

[dcheney]

Once, a long time ago, I remember reading on here about a supposed "age effect" on rankings. Meaning that a site that has been in place for a long time (how long?) gets a boost in the rankings just for still being there.

Sadly, I cna't find anything on it using the search here.

My web site has just past its 1 year anniversary at this url, and is approaching the 1 year anniversary of when google first deep crawled it. Should I expect a boost sometime soon?

(Site has same basic structure, but has more than doubled in size in that year. Non-commercial/resource type site.)

(feel free to move this whereever seems appropriate - I haven't quite figured out the new limitations yet :-)

[jeremy goodrich]

The 'age benefit' can be one of several things, depending on how you look at it:

If Google reverts to an earlier index (as happens often - just see how long they cache stuff for) then your site will be there - even if they roll back for several months, as happens often.

Also, as a site 'matures' it is more likely to have had it's link(s) inbound in place for longer, and if Google uses usage data from their toolbar, it will more likely have had this 'usage' as well.

Then there is the statistical sampling that they do once in a while in the form of redirects in the SERP's, to see what users click on, etc. Your site will more likely, as time goes on, have gotten a click from one of these - again, conjecture, but possible. :)

There aren't any mentions of favors for 'older sites' per se in the research papers I've read, but trust is earned with a search engine - meaning, the longer your domain has been online & "clean" the more likely it is what it seems to be, and not some auto generated search engine only stuff - which tends to have a shorter life span.

It's a bit of a stretch but if you read through some of Hector Garcia Molina's recent Stanford research (his name has been on a few Google & related papers) you might have seen the 'EigenTrust algorithm for reputation management in P2P networks' - which has many search engine related applications, as well as the potential improvement in a distributed platform for file sharing.

So, if you believe that the research he has done has search application - as I do - then it only makes sense that, as your site builds it's reputation & trust, then it will more likely do better. I wouldn't expect a rapid influx of traffic, but more like a 'steady state' of traffic over time from what keyword(s) & phrases you rank for.

[BigDave]

Then there is the simple factor that over time, you will gain more links. Without even trying, I gain several links a month, and I might lose one or two.

Even e-commerce sites will gain these freebie links after a while, as long as they make their customers happy.

[dcheney]

I've noticed the slow growth of inbound links over time - I'm always amazed at some of the strange places that link in to my site!

[Brett_Tabke]

Yes, this is not the famous Altavista age boost - this is just circumstance.

[1milehgh80210]

IMO time and luck are major factors in pagerank.
Say I start a new site and manage to get 50 links from other new or low PR (0-1)sites.
Since there is no such thing as negative PR, the benefit of
these incoming links can only increase.
I might lose a few links but a few others might take off (become PR5-7).
I'd imagine older sites would benefit most from these factors & become almost impossible to pry from the top of the serps. Could the dominic shuffle be related to this?